Entertainment

Google's Homepage Gets a Second Box — for Google+ Sharing

Google rarely clutters its minimalist home page with extra buttons or gizmos, but it made an exception for its social network Google+.

The company has added a share button to the right-hand corner of its patented search page design. (Yes, a mostly blank space is patentable.) The update is rolling out to all users in the coming weeks.

Clicking on the share button opens a box for adding updates to your Google+ account. It does not include your search results in the update.

The share box, first spotted by Marketing Land, is part of an update to the "Google bar", which the search giant announced earlier this month. Essentially, it migrates the share button from the bar to the Google homepage.

Previously, the Google Bar looked like this:

It may seem like a minor update, and in many ways it is. But this is the first time Google's homepage itself (rather than the bar above it) has offered any function other than search.

If Google+'s close integration with search results through Search plus Your World weren't enough to state Google's commitment to its social network, you can add this to the evidence.

Google makes most of its money through advertisers who want to pinpoint the consumers who are most likely to buy their products. Google has a ton of search and browsing data that can help them do that, but it doesn't have the valuable social graph that Facebook does.

Now the company is using search to help it build a social graph, via Google+ — and heavily advertise that network in the process.

"Personally, if find it intrusive," wrote Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. "I don’t get why I want to go to the Google home page to share content on Google+. I’ll go to Google+, if I want to do that."

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